A Rose by the Door Read online

  “I said, don’t touch me.”

  “Okay. I won’t.” The hurt in Gemma’s voice rever-berated between them. “I won’t.” She turned away and unhooked the dustpan from the nail where it hung beside the stove and began sweeping up glass. Each brush of the broom left rills of broken bulb sparkling dangerously on the linoleum. Each sweep sent a little clank of glass into the dustpan. Sweep. Sweep. Clatter. “I went into Nathan’s room because they called about my car this morning.” Scalding tears ran down the sides of Gemma’s nose, dripping onto the dirt, the glass, the floor. “It’s ready. And I have the money to pay for it. I just thought . . . it would be my chance to . . .”

  Bea stepped down from the chair. “You had no right.”

  “You had another son, Mrs. Bartling. Why don’t you still have him now? What did you do?”

  “I thought of the two of you all day,” Bea said. “I wanted all day to come home and tell you about my day at Nebraska Power. I wanted to tell you how we went out for hamburgers at lunch and how Geneva behaved herself and how I think her grandson Cory might be willing to baby-sit Paisley.”

  “I want to know why you had another child and he isn’t here now.”

  At Gemma’s words, “another child,” Bea visibly flinched. “I took you in out of the goodness of my heart. There is no other reason. Do you understand? The goodness of my heart. You have no right to pursue this, Gemma.”

  “I was married to your son. I believe I have a right to know the truth.”

  “You have your car. You’ve saved up money. There isn’t anything holding you here anymore.”

  “He was a little boy, too. He shared a room with Nathan. You cared about his grades and he went fishing with his father and he cried when your pets died. They woke up side by side in that room where you won’t let anybody touch anything. They raced out of this door and caught the bus and went to school together. How can somebody like that disappear from your life as if he never existed? You never even talk about him.”

  “That’s because I cannot bear it, Gemma. Nathan was the one who could forgive me my mistakes. The . . . the other one . . . is impossible. You don’t know.”

  “Say his name, why don’t you? Jacob. Jacob.”

  Bea grabbed the girl’s arm and almost made the dust pan spill. “Hush. Just hush about his name.”

  “Did you ever love ‘the other one,’ Mrs. Bartling? The brother you pretend doesn’t exist?”

  “Yes,” Bea whispered, as tears came to her eyes. “Yes, I loved him.”

  “I finally understand why Nathan ran. I understand how he wouldn’t want to be with you. Because you got rid of his little brother.”

  “I want you to go. Do you hear me? I want you to get your car and pack it up and leave.”

  “Of course we will. We never intended to stay,” Gemma lied. “Our car broke down once upon a time. That’s the only reason we ever stopped by.”

  “I loved Jacob,” Bea said, forcefully now, biting the edge of each word. “I loved Jacob more than you’ll ever know.”

  “Why didn’t you ever try to find him? When you saw how much it hurt Nathan, why didn’t you at least try to let them talk, if you couldn’t bring him home?”

  “Stop it! Can’t you see the answer to that just from reading Nathan’s cards? Jacob never answered any of those letters, did he? Jacob never wanted to be found.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  You sit right here and read a good book.” Gemma jostled the little beanbag chair until she’d made a nest the size of Paisley and thumped the little hollow with one hand. “This is perfect. Climb in.”

  “But I’m only four and a half, Mama,” the little girl wailed as she wiggled down inside the chair.

  “Sh-hhh. You can’t make this much noise in the library. They’ll ask us to leave.”

  “But I can’t read.”

  “We’ll find a book that’s got pictures, then. You can look at pictures instead.”

  “Will you read to me, Mama? Please?”

  Gemma shook her head. “Not tonight, honey bananas. I’ve got to spend time on the computer. This is why we came.”

  Gemma had two days before she picked up the Toyota. She had two days for a miracle. She could not stop thinking about Jacob. Maybe because, what little she knew of him, his story seemed exactly like hers.

  It would be easier to walk away, Gemma. It would be easier to cut your losses and stop caring.

  One minute, Jacob must have had a family. The next minute, he didn’t.

  Maybe if I found Jacob, she’d think I was good enough. Maybe she’d think I was good enough to belong.

  Every night, after Nathan had finished mopping the kill room at Omaha Corn-Fed Packing Company, after he’d washed off layers of blood and grime and gritted his teeth to let her rub ointment into muscles raw and aching from lugging sides of beef on his shoulders, he would escort her to a study carrel at the Creighton University Library, proudly lining his books along the table and showing her notes for his classes, all of them with splendid titles like American Education and the Interactive Process, Rhetoric and Composition, and Methods of Teaching Social Studies.

  More often than not, when Nathan went to work on a computer, he had insisted that Gemma sit right beside him, punching the same buttons in the workstation next to his, following the same steps. “I know this scares you, Gemma,” he’d tease her in a voice sounding more like a father’s voice than a lover’s. “Computers are going to be running everything in a few years. It isn’t going to hurt you to learn.”

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she’d say too loudly, kissing him hard on the cowlick that whorled endearingly in his blond hair as other Creighton students sent them dirty looks for whispering. “I don’t know what I’d do without you around to educate me.”

  And so, Gemma had Nathan to thank today when she signed her name confidently on the dotted line at the Garden County Library and the librarian assigned her to workstation number three.

  She had Nathan to thank when she logged on to the

  Internet and used the mouse to point the arrow to the top left-hand corner of the screen—the little box that read “Search the Net”—and double-clicked.

  As the screen began to appear on the monitor, Gemma scanned the page, looking for web pages or anything else that might be linked to the name Jacob Bartling.

  She found only a listing of third-graders from a school in Minnesota and a long babble of information written in German, complete with umlauts that, even if she’d had the inclination to read it, she wouldn’t have known how.

  Gemma had much better luck when she typed in the words “People Search.” An entire assortment of listings appeared, shouting at her with their huge bold letters, touting their promises and their possibilities: Find Or Investigate Anyone Anywhere; The Ultimate People Finder; ClassMates.com; Locate Anyone in the USA for $39.00!

  One by one, she pulled the sites up on the screen and followed the list of instructions. “Please fill in one or more of the fields below,” they each said, so Gemma typed in the relevant information with great care. Jacob Bartling. Born in Nebraska. Over and over again, the same words, locations, dates, names.

  Over and over again, the same disappointing message appeared on-screen.

  “Sorry, no matches found.”

  Gemma sighed, her shoulders lifting and falling with her one deep, disappointed breath. She broadened the search and checked the few sites that would search for any Jacob Bartling living anywhere in the United States.

  After a wait that seemed interminable, the tidings turned up on the screen again, taunting her, making her want to jostle the mouse and thump the computer in frustration, although she didn’t dare because she was in the library.

  “Sorry, no matches found.”

  “Hey, Alva T.” Gemma wrung out her rag in the huge industrial sink at the Cramalot Inn and hung it over the faucet to dry. “You got a minute? I’ve got a question to ask you.”

  Ever since th
ey’d toured the floral displays at the Garden County Fair, Alva had been determined to redecorate her tables with new, novel arrangements each week. The day after the fair had ended, she’d bought tiny terra-cotta pots and had filled them with clay and Tootsie Roll Pops so her customers could both amuse themselves before their meals were brought out and help themselves to candy after they’d eaten supper.

  The next week, Alva employed shish kebob skewers and impaled a collection of huge sunflowers she’d picked by the roadside, the great clusters of rough leaves and blossoms as big around as dinner plates—so enormous that the waitresses had to remove all the condiments from the tables and hand-carry them out whenever somebody complained.

  It had taken this many weeks before Alva could round up enough cowboy boots from garage sales to use as containers for petunias on her tables at The Cramalot Inn. Alva roved between the tables now, carrying the assortment of boots in a bus tray, trying each one out to see where it looked the best, adjusting the boot toes so they each pointed perfectly toward the salt and pepper shakers.

  “You help me fix these petunias to my liking,” Alva said as she held up one pot with three yellow and purple blossoms inside it, “and I’d be willing to answer just about any question in the world.”

  Gemma began following after her, fiddling with the flowers, but something about that seemed impossible today. Arranging petunias didn’t fit when your heart was heavy laden. “If you were out to find somebody lost and you didn’t know where they’d gone, how would you go about it?”

  Alva held up two boots—one light, one dark—deciding which would look best on the table next to the jukebox. “Well, that depends,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “On whether or not the person you’re looking for lives in Nebraska.”

  Gemma stopped at a table by the window and began adjusting petunias so their blossoms faced forward. “I wish I knew the answer to that. If I did, it would be a whole lot easier. He started out in Nebraska, but I don’t know if he ended up there.”

  “If you knew what county you were after, you could always use a snoop book.”

  “A snoop book?”

  “The Lion’s Club in Garden County sells them every year. Only this’ll be the last edition because there are new laws banning public access. Somebody in the government’s decided it’s a bad idea, all of us running around with a county license-plate directory tucked under our front seats.”

  “I never heard of such a thing.”

  “Oh, Gemma, you wouldn’t, coming from Omaha. Omaha’s a big place. I’m talking about rural Nebraska. You see kids parking on the corner and necking, you look them up in the book, find out who they are, and call their mamas to tell them what’s going on. You want to know who’s parked outside your neighbor’s house? Look it up.”

  “Alva T!”

  “You don’t like the way somebody’s driving, you find out who he is from the snoop book, call him up about suppertime when you know he’ll be sitting at the table, and say, ‘Joe Cheney, this is Alva Torrington. I didn’t much like the way your green pickup with the blue door cut me off at the intersection of Albees and School Street this morning. Don’t let it happen again.’” Alva shrugged. “Nebraska is the easiest place in the world to find somebody, if you’ve got a mind to do that.”

  Every table had a boot now, but only half of them sported flowers. Gemma picked up her pace, adjusting leaves and arranging blossoms with only half the effort that she’d given them in the beginning. “Alva, if it’s so easy to find somebody in Nebraska, how come Mrs. Bartling never could find her son?”

  Alva came up beside Gemma and started arranging petunias herself. “She’s told you a little about Nathan, has she?”

  Gemma nodded, not certain what she should say.

  “Well, Nathan was a sly one. That’s why he went to Omaha, don’t you think? He stayed close by but he managed to hide himself in a big town, all at the same time.”

  “Did she try to find him?”

  “She tried harder than anybody I’d ever seen. And everywhere she turned she hit a dead end. It’s always been hard enough getting authorities to go after runaways of any age. But take one that’s left a note telling that he’s leaving. Take one that’s within three weeks of graduation and a month of his eighteenth birthday. No one’s willing to put much effort out for that.”

  “Nobody helped her at all?”

  “Oh, they looked for a few months, trying to satisfy her. Somebody found one of his All-Star baseball caps in the grass by the roadside over by Gothenburg. They figure it blew off his head while he was hitchhiking. That was the closest they ever came.”

  Gemma recalled the times she’d moved with Nathan during the last three years, the way she’d chastised him for not changing his address on his driver’s license, the way he always seemed to be catching up with himself, working his paperwork from months behind. Even when he’d signed up for classes at Creighton, he’d used the address of Omaha Corn-Fed Packing because the trailer where they’d lived had neither mail delivery nor phone.

  “It all starts to make sense, doesn’t it?” Gemma said, not stopping to think what she’d be giving away when she spoke. “I always got so mad at him when he wouldn’t keep his driver’s license up to date. I used to say, ‘If anybody was trying to find you for something, they’d never be able to do it.’ And so, when he died . ..” She trailed off.

  Alva looked up from the petunias. She stared at her waitress instead. “You knew Nathan?”

  Gemma held up her left hand, fingering the plain gold band she wore. “This is Nathan’s ring, Alva. I was married to him.”

  Alva set the tray full of boots down so hard that half of them fell over. “Oh, my goodness.” She let the fallen boots lie and hugged her employee. “Everybody thought you were a stranger come to town. Everybody thought Be a Bartling was a crazy, lonely woman, taking you in the way she did. Now, to find out you’re Bea’s family instead!”

  “Yes,” Gemma said with a tinge of gloom in her voice. “We’re Bea’s family. It’s been good to be here for a while. It’s been good to get to know her some. But we’ll be moving on now that my car’s fixed. Just as soon as I earn off eight more hours at the museum.”

  “So, is this why you were asking about finding somebody? Because you were wondering what it was like for her, trying to find Nathan?”

  “No. There was somebody else I wanted to find.”

  Alva T. strolled to the cash register and pulled out a heap of books. “You gonna do something, I believe in covering the territory,” she said, winking as she hefted them over and plopped the entire pile on the table in front of Gemma. “Here you go. Anything you want. Snoop books from Garden County, Howard County, Washington County, Lincoln County, Jefferson County, and Nuckolls County as well.”

  Gemma sat down hard beside the mountain of little directories. She didn’t know where to begin.

  “They’re cross referenced,” Alva said, leafing through the top one in the stack. “License plates here. Names in the back. Alphabetical order.” She paused with her thumb stuck inside to mark her place. “What name you looking for, Gemma? I’ll show you how.”

  “Bartling,” Gemma said, her voice still sounding overwhelmed. “I’m looking for a Bartling.”

  Alva glanced up, waiting. “A Bartling? Who? What’s the first name? Can’t go much further without one of those.”

  “Mrs. Bartling had another son. I’ve found Nathan’s letters to him,” Gemma said. “I’m looking for Jacob Bartling.”

  “Humph.” Alva gave a little snort and her thumb slipped free. “You can look as far and wide as you want, Gemma Franklin. You aren’t going to find anybody by that name.” The book slapped shut.

  Gemma scooted the book across the table and began to rifle through its pages herself. “Well, this is funny, Alva. All this time I’ve known you, and it’s never been like you to discourage a person this way.”

  “It has nothing to do with discouraging a person.
” Alva had the most unusual expression on her face; Gemma had never seen her quite so solemn. “I care about you too much to let you go off on some wild-goose chase like this. There’s no such person as Jacob Bartling. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  Deputy Jay Triplett was loading his uniform and his black Labrador retriever into his truck when Gemma hurried toward him along the curb, the strap of her purse laced over her shoulder, the rest of it flying sidelong beside her. “Deputy Triplett!” she called out, raising one hand. “Deputy Triplett, wait!”

  He lifted a hand in salute. “Hello, Miss Franklin. Long time no see. Did you have a good time at the fair?”

  “We did.” Gemma thought back upon the evening she’d spent with Mrs. Bartling—how they’d laughed together, how they had enjoyed being together and had enjoyed the day. “We had a good time. I wish we could do it again.”

  This man didn’t seem nearly so imposing without his regalia of leather pouches, stiff khaki creases, winking badges, and striking shoulder patches. For the first time, Gemma looked up and noticed the smattering of freckles across his nose. She hadn’t noticed those before, and this surprised her. Without the visor of his deputy’s cap shadowing his face, Gemma could see the light gray-blue of his eyes, the hash marks of dark indigo radiating from the center.

  For the first time she realized that he couldn’t be much older than Nathan had been.

  “I don’t know how you fit inside that roller coaster car, Deputy Triplett. It was the smallest one I’ve ever seen. Much smaller than the ones in Omaha.”

  “I don’t know how I did it, either.” He laughed and tucked the tail of his plaid sports shirt into the waist band of his jeans. “How come you haven’t gotten arrested for anything lately? There isn’t any excitement around Ash Hollow anymore, now that you’ve decided to lay low.”

  Gemma laughed, too, but she kept shifting her weight from one foot to the other, knowing that Jay Triplett—trained officer of the law and expert on body language—must notice that she’d come with some specific intent in mind. She waited, neither moving from where she stood, nor replying.