“Sarah, my housekeeper, will fetch you shortly and show you upstairs. If there’s anything you want, you’ve only to request it.”
“I’ll need my things—my satchel!” she blurted but Caleb was gone, Seth glancing over his shoulder and appearing reluctant to leave her before he, too, strode from the room.
She wished he could have stayed with her, wanting to ask him if he’d realized from the start that her resemblance to Caleb wasn’t just coincidence.
No wonder Seth had said he thought there was something familiar about her! Still holding her mother’s letter, Kari sank onto the settee.
To have been revived from a dead faint to a whirlwind of gut-wrenching emotion and astounding revelations had sapped her completely. Instead of stunned, she felt numb, and not sure what to think of everything that had just happened.
No wonder, too, that her mother had wanted her to hand-deliver the letter. If Kari had known its contents, she would most likely have never boarded the train!
Arne Hagen had been the most wonderful father to her, kind, patient, and encouraging her in everything she did whether schoolwork or learning from her mother how to bake his favorite apple pie. She didn’t need or want another father! She and her siblings were doing just fine, scraping by to be sure, yet perhaps Lara had feared for their survival once she was gone.
Kari looked around her at the well-appointed parlor, the furnishings more grand than anything she had seen in the finest homes in Faribault that she’d visited as a seamstress.
Was it simply that Lara had wanted a better life for Kari just as she’d said in her letter, a life where Kari would be protected and provided for…and perhaps her sisters and brother, too? Or had her mother been trying to make amends to the man she’d truly loved by presenting him with the daughter he never knew he had?
Kari closed her eyes, her head aching from her tumbling thoughts.
How could Lara have possibly known how prominent Caleb had become? Unless when they had spoken of their hopes and dreams years ago, her mother had always believed he would do well for himself, with or without her at his side…
A wave of intense sadness swept Kari suddenly for her mother, her father, and Caleb, too.
Lovers forever separated and love never fully realized for Arne to have married a young woman whose heart belonged to someone else. He must have known Lara carried another man’s child. Surely her grandfather wouldn’t have deceived him, but perhaps had offered Arne enough money to start a homestead if he agreed to wed a tainted bride?
The letter dropped to the carpeted floor as Kari covered her face with her hands, so many questions tormenting her that would never be answered.
Another question, too, of a more immediate nature.
Was Caleb Walker even pleased that she had arrived upon his doorstep? He’d acknowledged her as his daughter, but almost dispassionately as if he’d had no emotion left to extend his hand to her or to give her the briefest of fatherly embraces. Instead he spoke of his passion for horse racing…horse racing!
“Miss Walker, your rooms are almost ready,” came a pleasant-sounding Irish brogue from just inside the room, a plump, middle-aged woman with dark curls standing there. “I’m Sarah Murphy, the housekeeper—”
“My name is Hagen, Kari Hagen.”
“Oh, forgive me. Mr. Walker said the other, but of course, we’re all a bit flustered at such happy news. His own daughter come home to live in Walker Creek!”
“No, no, I won’t be staying,” Kari corrected her, rising from the settee. “My home is in Minnesota. I have family waiting for me to return.”
Sarah folded her hands across her ample middle, her tone placating as if she spoke to a child. “Whatever you say, miss. Shall we go?”
Kari nodded, but first she retrieved her mother’s letter and set it upon a table.
She imagined Caleb would look for it later. She traced her finger tenderly across Lara’s handwriting and then with a sigh, followed the housekeeper out the door.
Chapter 4
“Still up, boss? It’s midnight already and morning comes early round here. What’s eating you?”
Seth didn’t respond to the skinny old-timer joining him on the bunkhouse porch, Lucius Dean taking a pull on his hand-rolled cigarette. As fragrant tobacco smoke curled in the air, Seth went right on staring at the distant house gleaming a ghostly white in the moonlight, only one window on the first floor still lit.
The window to Caleb’s study, where Seth had no doubt his uncle sat at his desk throwing back another glass of whiskey as he stared at the letter he’d probably memorized by now.
His lost love Lara’s letter, Seth still staggered by everything he’d witnessed earlier that day.
His gut instinct hadn’t been wrong, though he couldn’t help shaking his head that he’d guessed the familial connection between Kari Hagen and his uncle well before the astounding showdown in the parlor.
Astounding? That wasn’t even the word for it!
