“An older lady?” came Kari’s query as Ingrid donned the yellow gingham dress she’d worn to the final fitting.
“Yes, quite old,” Anita replied. “Though you would never know it from how spry she was. I was astonished when she came up so suddenly behind me and I never even heard her footsteps! She wore the most peculiar clothing, too, a style unlike anything I’ve seen before. A brown dress and a matching brown bonnet—”
“That sounds like the same woman that stopped me from stepping in front of that wagon,” Ingrid murmured, buttoning her bodice as she came around the screen. “Silvery hair? A lilting voice with a Norwegian accent?”
“Yes, exactly!” Anita blurted, while Kari had seemed to turn a little pale.
“I thought you said Joshua shouted for you to stop, Ingrid.”
“He told me he did, but I would swear the same woman that spoke to Anita cried out to warn me just in time. I was so upset and not paying attention, I can’t be sure—”
“I saw her, too, on the train into Walker Creek. She said her name was Kari, just like mine.” Kari sank into a chair, shaking her head in disbelief. “I told her I’d been christened after Mama’s great-aunt, Tante Kari. Don’t you remember Mama talking about her? The cardamom cake she always made for us was her great-aunt’s recipe. I think she said Tante Kari came over from Norway with Solveig, her niece and our grandmother. When Solveig died giving birth to Mama, Tante Kari helped to raise her until she passed away when Mama was six.”
“Heavens, that was thirty-four years ago,” Ingrid murmured, glancing from Anita to Kari. “This woman looked very much alive, though now that I think about it, she never once touched me. Maybe I imagined the whole thing! I wanted to thank her for saving my life, but I didn’t see her anywhere. I thought she’d gone into a shop.”
“Ithought she’d stayed on the train, but Seth saw her, too. She came up to him on the platform and told him it looked like I was lost and needed his help. Then we both saw her at the back of the church after our wedding, and I wanted to greet her—but she vanished. Seth said I even looked like her…and that maybe I had a guardian angel.”
“A guardian angel?” Now Ingrid sank into the chair opposite Kari’s, while Anita clasped her hands together with excitement.
“Oh, my, what if it’s true? You saw her several times, Kari, and then Ingrid and now me! Maybe Mama prayed for special help from heaven to watch out for us after she was gone. Do you think it’s possible?”
“Anything’s possible,” Margaret McMaster broke in, securing with string an oblong box that held Ingrid’s wedding dress. “I believe a guardian angel saved my granddaughter Pearl’s life when she was nearly carried away by a tornado. She’ll be coming to visit sometime this year and you can ask her about it.”
“A tornado! I’m so glad Pearl was spared, Margaret, but guardian angels? I don’t know what to think.” Kari rose from the chair as the seamstress stacked the box atop two others on the counter. “The elderly woman I spoke to seemed very real, and godly, too. She told me to trust in the Lord with all my heart, even in my darkest moments, which gave me great comfort when Seth went missing in that terrible storm.”
“Exactly what a guardian angel would say!” Anita blurted with exasperation. “Don’t you see that she helped to bring you and Seth together? Maybe she’s not our only angel, either. You said yourself that you saw Mama’s face when Caleb came so close to taking his own life, and that he kept saying her name over and over as if he’d seen her, too!”
“Anita, I shared that with you in confidence!” Kari objected as Ingrid gasped, both of them glancing at Mrs. McMaster.
“Don’t worry, girls, I’ve heard plenty of secrets in this shop and haven’t breathed a word of them to anyone. I’ve never mentioned what happened to Pearl, either, until today. You’re all blessed to know such love that heaven would intervene on your behalf. Speaking of Mr. Walker, weren’t you meeting him for lunch at the hotel? It’s almost noon.”
Ingrid’s heart seemed to jump as she glanced at the ornate clock atop a shelf, not because she feared being late for lunch but that she’d told Joshua she would visit him for a few moments after her fitting. She couldn’t wait to see him!
“Thank you so much for the perfect dress,” she said to Mrs. McMaster, giving her a big hug. Her sisters did the same, smiling and laughing again as they gathered up the boxes with their own dresses for the wedding and hastened out the door.
“Just pile them in the back of the carriage,” Kari directed. “They’ll be fine while we eat lunch.”
Ingrid obliged her, but then stepped back onto the sidewalk. “You and Anita go ahead. I promised Joshua I’d stop in to see him after we were done here. I won’t be long.”
“Tell the new mayor we’ll see him at the church tomorrow!” Kari called out, Ingrid already hurrying on her way as her sisters climbed into the carriage.
New mayor.
Ingrid couldn’t help smiling, her happiness made complete by Joshua’s recently appointed position. His tenure as sheriff had ended only days after he’d asked Caleb for his blessing to marry her, Caleb encouraging the former mayor, Ronald White, to retire a few months earlier than planned so Joshua might have the job.
She would have supported him wholeheartedly if he had wanted to remain as sheriff, knowing how seriously he had taken protecting the citizens of Walker Creek. Yet she couldn’t deny her immense relief when Joshua had accepted and relinquished his duties to one of his deputies.
It hadn’t been Joshua who had run Cain and Connor Sutherland and their three surly ranch hands out of town a few days ago when their two-week jail sentence was up, but Sheriff Luke Braun.
A cousin of the deputy Cormac had killed, and as dead serious about keeping the town safe from ruffians and law-breakers as Joshua had been.
That hadn’t been enough for Caleb, though. As chief director of Walker Creek Bank, he foreclosed upon the Sutherland ranch for non-payment of debt. Then he vowed to set the Texas Rangers on the brothers and anyone who’d worked for them if they ever showed their faces again in the county.
Ingrid shivered at the memory of those men ogling her, but shoved the unpleasant thought away as she came to the door of the mayor’s office. She didn’t readily go in, but stared up at the two-story brick building on the same block as the bank and the Frederick Hotel, pride filling her.
Her husband—well,almosther husband, Mayor Joshua Logan. The talk of guardian angels in the seamstress shop came flooding back her, Ingrid believing in her heart that it had to be true. Some instinct told her that dear little woman had brought them together in more ways than she would ever know.
“Tante Kari, thank you…thank you!” she whispered, so immensely grateful, too, for Joshua’s new job and his impressive new office.
